Happy Father’s Day to all you guys who deserve it.
My dad has been gone for more than 30 years, but I found myself in deep thought Sunday morning, conjuring up some very old and fond memories.
His formal first name was Myer, but everyone knew him as Mike, the funeral supply salesman who spent his workdays visiting mortuaries all over New England and, I guess because he needed to, developing quite a sense of humor about death.
On the weekends when I was young, we would play catch in the backyard. The Red Sox weren’t very good back then, and every so often he’d say, “You wanna go to the ball game?” as my eyes lit up.
One Sunday in late September, we drove in not much traffic toward Fenway Park and bought a couple of tickets at the box office to see Ted Williams play his last home game for the Sox. Teddy Ballgame hit a home run in his very last at-bat, and I can still see the ball flying toward the right-field bleachers.
In junior high school, I did not play a football game without my dad watching from a folding lawn chair at the corner of the field. In high school he sat in the stands with my mother, calming her down when someone tackled me. He tried to tell her that was the name of the game.
We watched golf a lot together, especially when we got a color TV. One weekend, cheering for our hero Arnold Palmer, he said, “You want to go play 9 holes?” Until then, our golf was hitting plastic balls in the side yard. My eyes lit up even bigger this time.We grabbed two rickety sets from the garage and drove to a local munie in the late afternoon. We dragged our pull carts up to the first tee, a par 3 where you could see the hole, start to finish.
That image, the emerald grass leading to the green, remains one of the most beautiful scenes of my young life. We hacked it around, and it wasn’t long before we were both regulars on the links.
Thanks, dad, for that and everything else.
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